First of all, I'm happy to be writing my first blog at AjaxWidgets.com. I will try to publish a couple each week, but cannot promise to beat my companion
Thomas in quantity... :-)
And now to the subject: what can Ajax do for my business and is it mature for the spread sheet and to be able to give us an positive return of investment?
Independent of your type of business we have to assume that you are interested putting something on the web. What Ajax gives you is a more interactive and responsive web page, and the user will have a more desktop like experience. A well designed Ajax web page should eliminate waiting on things to happen, which also includes waiting for a bunch of WAY TO BIG javascript files to load upfront...
"Yes", you say, "I know how I want my Ajax web / page to act and be, I've seen several examples on Internet which I really like." Yes, I totally agree! There are a lot of beauties available for the public:
Netvibes,
our friends at 24SevenOffice,
Pageflakes.com and several more. When seeing all these great applications, the question is now how to get there, and how to get there within budget. The challenge with developing Ajax applications / sites is that it's a quite fresh technology and you will probably meet some of the obstacles associated with emerging technologies such as: less stability, not so good documentation (if any), less available competency, a smaller community (but hopefully growing), less support (but hopefully support at all) and the risk of the technology not being hot the next years, but replaced by a better solution.
Ajax affects both the client and the server side of your web application. If you want to go all the way yourself, your developers have to teach themselves advanced Javascript, manipulating the DOM, XHLHttpRequest-based client-server communications and asynchronous communications event handling. At the server side you have to build your own way of receiving the Ajax request and sending custom responses to the client. If you are concerned with ROI you should have very special needs to go the whole way on your own.... Inventing the wheel bla bla bla....
I mean that building Ajax applications / sites shouldn't have to involve much Javascript and complex client code. To meet this requirement of course, you will have to use an existing Ajax framework. Writing less client code, and instead manipulating everything through your server side code, I will guarantee you will spend less time at your project and the maintenance cost will be drastically reduced.
Good reading about this topic can be found at
www.openajax.orgIn my next blog I will give you a comparison sheet to visualize the differences and important elements in the most common Ajax libraries for ASP.NET that will affect the development and lifetime cost of your next Ajax project. Of course, it will be a challenge to be 100% neutral towards our own
Gaia Ajax Widgets...